Rich Clarkson/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images - John Wooden won 10 national championships as coach of the U.C.L.A. Bruins, and is often considered one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history.
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June 4, 2010
John Wooden, Who Built Incomparable Dynasty at U.C.L.A., Dies at 99
By FRANK LITSKY and JOHN BRANCH
Correction Appended
John Wooden, a staid Midwesterner who migrated to U.C.L.A. and became college basketball’s most successful coach, earning the nickname the Wizard of Westwood and an enduring place in sports history, died Friday at Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since May 26. He was 99. His death was announced by the university. Wooden created a sports dynasty against which all others are compared, and usually pale. His teams at U.C.L.A. won 10 national championships in a 12-season stretch from 1964 to 1975. From 1971 to 1974, U.C.L.A. won 88 consecutive games, still the N.C.A.A. record. Four of Wooden’s teams finished with 30-0 records, including his first championship team, which featured no starters taller than 6 feet 5 inches.
Three of his other championship teams were anchored by the 7-foot-2 center Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Two others were led by center Bill Walton, a three-time national player of the year.
Wooden retired after U.C.L.A.’s 1975 championship victory over Kentucky. A slight man hugely popular for his winning record and his understated approach, he ultimately became viewed as a kind of sage for both basketball and life, a symbol of both excellence and simpler times. Even in retirement he remained a beloved figure and a constant presence at U.C.L.A., watching most games from a seat behind the home bench at Pauley Pavilion. Lines of well-wishers and autograph-seekers often snaked their way to his seat in Section 103B. Wooden always obliged his fans, until the university and his family requested that he be granted privacy in January 2008, when he was 97.
A dynasty like Wooden’s would be almost impossible now, because the best players seldom spend more than a year or two in college before turning professional. No N.C.A.A. men’s basketball coach has won more than four championships since Wooden retired. Of Wooden’s eight coaching successors at U.C.L.A., only one — Jim Harrick in 1995 — won an N.C.A.A. championship with the Bruins, who have managed to retain an air of the elite among basketball programs largely on Wooden’s legacy.
Wooden’s success fed upon itself. When he won his first two national championships, landed Alcindor and moved home games to the new Pauley Pavilion, high school stars begged to play for him. Besides Abdul-Jabbar and Walton, Wooden turned out celebrated players like Gail Goodrich, Walt Hazzard, Keith Erickson, Henry Bibby, Lucius Allen, Sidney Wicks, Jamaal Wilkes and Marques Johnson.
“He was almost a mystical figure by the time I got to U.C.L.A.,” said Johnson, a starter on Wooden’s final team. “I couldn’t really sit down and have a conversation with him about real things just because I had so much reverence for him — for who he was and what he had accomplished.” Johnson added, “He never gave that perception that that was the way he wanted you to treat him, but it was just how it was.” Johnson, like many of Wooden’s players, grew closer to the coach in the decades after Wooden retired and visited him often.
In his autobiography, “Giant Steps” (Bantam, 1983), Abdul-Jabbar recalled his first meeting with Wooden. “Coach Wooden’s office was about the size of a walk-in closet,” he wrote. “I was brought in, and there was this very quaint-looking Midwesterner. I’d heard a lot about this man and his basketball wisdom, but he surely did look like he belonged in a one-room schoolhouse.”
He continued: “I found myself liking Mr. Wooden right away. He was calm, in no hurry to impress me with his knowledge or his power. He called me Lewis, and that decision endeared him to me even more. It was at once formal, my full name. I was no baby Lewie. Lewis. I liked that.”
Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read: “Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”
Wooden said he lived by that creed, and few players tested him. One who did was Walton, a gifted 6-foot-11 center with flowing red hair who went on to play for 10 seasons in the N.B.A. At the start of Walton’s senior season, in 1973, his U.C.L.A. teams had won 75 consecutive games and 2 N.C.A.A. titles. But when Wooden walked into the locker room before the first practice and saw Walton’s just-trimmed but still long hair, he said: “Bill, that’s not short enough. We’re sure going to miss you on this team. Get on out of here.” Walton jumped onto his bicycle, raced back to the barber shop where his hair had been trimmed the day before, got his head almost shaved and rode back. He made the last half-hour of practice.
During the Vietnam War era, Wooden’s young players, including Walton, asked permission to stage an antiwar protest. “He asked us if this reflected our convictions,” one player, Steve Patterson, told Sports Illustrated in 1989, “and we told him it did. He told us he had his convictions, too, and if we missed practice it would be the end of our careers at U.C.L.A.”
In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, Wooden said his coaching philosophy revolved around three main ideals. One was to get his players “in the best possible condition.” Another was “quickness.”
“I wanted my centers to be quicker than the opposing centers, the forwards quicker than their forwards, and so on,” he explained.
The third was teamwork: “You better play together as a team or you sit.”
“People ask me if I’d permit fancy things, like dunks,” Wooden said. “Well, if they did dunk, it was with no fancy flair. No behind-the-back dribbles or passes unless necessary. If it was for show, you were on the bench.”
John Robert Wooden was born into a Dutch-Irish family on Oct. 14, 1910, in Hall, Ind., and grew up in a farmhouse that had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Before his sophomore year in high school, when his father, Joshua, and his mother, Roxie, lost the farm, he and his three brothers moved to Martinsville, 8 miles away and 30 miles south of Indianapolis. His first basketball was a black cotton sock his mother had stuffed with rags. The hoop was a tomato basket until his father forged a rim from the rings of a barrel.
Wooden later led Martinsville High School to three consecutive state finals, winning in 1927. Playing the cornet in the school band at the time was Nellie Riley, a classmate. They were inseparable from then on; their marriage lasted 53 years, until her death in 1985.
Wooden went to Purdue University, even though it had no athletic scholarships. To get tuition money, he spent summers doing construction work.
At Purdue he was a basketball all-American, a 5-foot-10, 175-pound guard and team captain. In 1932, he led Purdue to the Helms Foundation’s unofficial national championship and was named national player of the year. An English major, he also had the highest grade-point average of any Purdue athlete that year. He earned a teaching degree and taught at Dayton High School in Dayton, Ky., where he also coached almost everything, including tennis and baseball. Two years later he moved back to Indiana, to South Bend Central High School, where for nine years he taught English and coached basketball. In his 11 years as a high school basketball coach, his record was 218-42.
From 1943 to 1946, he served in the Navy as a physical education instructor. Afterward, Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State) hired him as athletic director and basketball and baseball coach. In 1948, U.C.L.A. wooed him away as basketball coach for $6,000 a year. His team practiced in a little gymnasium and had to share the court with the wrestling and gymnastics teams.
His success at U.C.L.A, where he perfected a merciless zone defense, brought him a nickname he hated: the Wizard of Westwood, a reference to the Westwood section of Los Angeles, the site of the campus.
Wooden was a religious man whose strongest exclamation was “Goodness gracious sakes alive!” Still, many opposing coaches thought he was not always a saint. Digger Phelps, the longtime Notre Dame coach, once said Wooden rode officials and opposing players more than any other coach. Wooden admitted he was no innocent.
“The thing I may be ashamed of more than anything else is having talked to opposing players,” he said. “Not calling them names, but saying something like ‘Keep your hands off him’ or ‘Don’t be a butcher.’ ”
There was a more serious mark against Wooden and his reign. By the mid-1970s, Sam Gilbert, a team booster, had befriended many U.C.L.A. players. Several said he had given them illegal benefits. According to allegations reported in The Los Angeles Times in 1982, Gilbert provided cars and clothes for U.C.L.A. players and even arranged abortions for their girlfriends at times during the previous 15 years.
“I warned them, but I couldn’t pick their friends,” Wooden told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “I honestly felt Sam meant well.”
In December 1981 — more than six years after Wooden coached his last game — the N.C.A.A. placed U.C.L.A.’s basketball program on a two-year probation for violations, some involving Gilbert, although no legal action was taken against him.
Wooden was 64 and his wife was ill when he retired in 1975, saying he had lost desire. He left with a 620-147 record in 27 years at U.C.L.A. and a 40-year head coaching record of 885-203.
He was honored in many places. Martinsville, Ind., where he grew up, has a John R. Wooden Drive and a John R. Wooden Gymnasium at Martinsville High School. A college basketball player-of-the-year award is named for him. The midseason John R. Wooden Classic features leading college teams. He was the first person elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as both player and coach. In 2003, U.C.L.A. named its basketball floor the Nell and John Wooden Court.
Ever self-effacing, he declined when U.C.L.A. proposed a ceremony for his 90th birthday. In later years he lived in a modest condominium in Encino, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Hip-replacement surgery forced him to give up morning walks. He also needed his knees replaced, and he walked with a cane.
Wooden watched U.C.L.A. on television as it went to the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four in 2006, 2007 and 2008. A fall at his home in February 2008 left him with a broken wrist and collarbone. He spent several weeks at a hospital and a rehabilitation center.
For most of his retirement, large crowds flocked to his speeches, usually revolving around his “Pyramid of Success,” 15 conceptual building blocks of traits like industriousness, alertness and poise, held together by faith and patience. In recent years Wooden simply sat in a chair and spoke for up to an hour without notes, hoping to impart his wisdom to newer generations. His former players said they did not appreciate Wooden’s life lessons when they were young, but the precepts stuck with them.
“At the time it was like, ‘Pyramid, shmyramid,’ ” Marques Johnson said. “ ‘Where’s the party at? Where are the girls at?’ I didn’t want to hear anything about principles and living a life of integrity at that time. But as you get older, and you have kids, and you try to pass on life lessons, now it becomes a great learning tool.”
Wooden is survived by a son, James, of Orange County, Calif.; a daughter, Nancy, of Los Angeles; 7 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
Wooden always described his job as teacher, not coach. “He broke basketball down to its basic elements,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in The New York Times in 2000. “He always told us basketball was a simple game, but his ability to make the game simple was part of his genius.”
Abdul-Jabbar recalled that there “was no ranting and raving, no histrionics or theatrics.” He continued: “To lead the way Coach Wooden led takes a tremendous amount of faith. He was almost mystical in his approach, yet that approach only strengthened our confidence. Coach Wooden enjoyed winning, but he did not put winning above everything. He was more concerned that we became successful as human beings, that we earned our degrees, that we learned to make the right choices as adults and as parents.
“In essence,” Abdul-Jabbar concluded, “he was preparing us for life.”
Correction: June 5, 2010
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Encino. It is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles; it does not lie outside of it.
